Philip Guston, Dissenting Painter

Reviewing reissued books (for The Jackdaw) in the run up to a large exhibition at Tate Modern, London (opens October), led me to consider Philip Guston as a model of dissention.

“Philip Guston Now”, installation view, 2022, © Museum of Fine Art, Houston

Canadian-American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980) can be taken as a hero for dissenting artists. How so? Surely a Jewish member of the New York intelligentsia, friend of noted authors, supporter of unions, politically left in outlook and anti-war, could hardly be described as a dissenter in the New York art world. After all, looking at the direction of travel of political and social conventions in the USA in recent decades, it seems Guston’s liberal outlook won the day. I would not argue with that interpretation but it leaves out the most important part of being a painter – that is, the nature of the art one makes, endorses, shows and thinks about daily for most of one’s life. With respect to painting, Guston was a dissenter who risked his reputation and livelihood because he chose to revolt.

Born in Canada, Guston studied painting in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He visited Mexico and painted an anti-Fascist mural. Like the Mexican Muralists, he was a socialist and saw his art in terms of the necessity of social engagement, both in subject and reception. When the WPA commenced, he took up a position in the Mural Department of the WPA. Paid to decorate buildings, Guston had a chance to experience the camaraderie of working in teams that art that would reach a wide public immediately, with a degree of security and social affirmation provided by Roosevelt’s New Deal. Later, like many young artists fostered towards a professional career by the WPA, Guston gravitated to New York, where he joined the scene in Greenwich Village and Union Square. He joined a group of competitive artists who shared common goals and spoke a shared language of Modernism. When Abstract Expressionism made inroads in commercial galleries and the press, Guston contributed his paintings, which were dubbed Abstract Impressionism. He won the Carnegie Prize for painting, the Guggenheim fellowship and Prix de Rome and went on to receive the honour of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1962. Much of his income came from teaching positions in art schools.

All of this shows how Guston was respected by the cognoscenti, appreciated by his peers and firmly at the centre of his professional field. Although at outlier socially in the USA as dedicated liberal and Modernist, he was those respects perfectly standard with regard to his artist peers and appreciators of abstract art. He counted many poets, authors, photographers, painters and sculptors as not only colleagues but personal friends. When, in the late 1960s he started to play with inchoate forms, he was groping his way to figuration. Then, in 1968, at the height of Vietnam War, frustrated at the distance between the conventions of Abstract Expressionism and his compulsion to speak about real objects and actual events, Guston allowed the images back in. Guston rejected pure abstraction and began to paint figures, buildings, furniture, rooms, books, shoes, food. He was liberated from liberation and squalid reality intruded in the etiolated space of art. (This was no doubt also a reflection of his social-engagement of socialist mural painting in the 1930s.)

Guston declared, in a private note, that “American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be. Unwilling to show this badness, this rawness. It is laughable, this lie. Anything but this! What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake!”[i] He rejected the assumption of purity that Clement Greenberg’s theory (of art’s inevitable drive towards autonomy and specialisation) entailed. “There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually define its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is ‘impure’. It is adjustment of ‘impurities’ which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.”[ii]     

Painting real things and dealing with experiences – albeit in a painterly, simplified manner – added richness to Guston’s output. He could talk about banal daily activity but add a dimension of existential anxiety to it. The bean-head that stares at the bottle confronts the unhealthy hold of alcohol. The smoking head in bed admits to cravings and weaknesses that amount to compulsions that fill its world. When Guston painted books, scrolls, fires and cauldrons, he could approach perennial motifs that hold religious power in our imaginations: race memory, archetypes and essential symbols. These are ideas and symbols that dominate our mental landscapes. For those artists who wish to draw on the compelling energy of real objects with symbolic power, they should look to Guston, even if they ultimately conclude his style, handling and aesthetic framework are not compatible with their aspirations.

Philip Guston in the studio, early 1970s

When he exhibited these paintings in New York in 1970, it was seen as a betrayal. Guston was considered to have stabbed Modernism in the back. All of the battles that Modernists had fought with critics in the 1930s and 1940s, pushing back against public mockery and official disdain, had been for naught, his colleagues thought. Guston had degraded himself and art; he had sided with those anti-Modernists (including traditionalists, Regionalists, social conservatives and (worst of all) Fascists). He received a vicious backlash. The exhibition was savaged, little sold and Guston realised his gallery, Marlborough Gallery, no longer had confidence in his art, so he left the gallery. There were serious consequences for Guston following his conscience and deciding that art had more meaning when it was founded in the objects and spaces of the real world. Friendships were irreparably broken, support networks severed. For the next decade – until mere months before his final exhibition and death – Guston experienced what has been described as “house arrest”, being shunned by the art establishment and existing in internal exile.  

If any dissenting movement is to arise in the West, it needs to have artists who are willing to take risks, as I outlined on my article on artists as gamblers. Will there be artists who are able to separate themselves from the teat of the state[iii] and strike out with new art that embodies the beliefs they hold and that the governing elite fear and deride? Guston is a model for that because he had a powerful commitment to art that he loved, as well as his personal beliefs. Those beliefs may not be your own, but to decline to follow conventions that underwrite your livelihood and are a core belief of your community – and to do it in a public fashion – indicates an uncommon degree of commitment and strength of character. It is worth noting that Guston had reasons both artistic and political for thinking that the style of the day (by then promoted by the state and media as typically American and indicative of liberal freedoms) was, if not artistically bankrupt, then compromised and limiting. Rebelling after fighting (alongside colleagues) so many years to be taken seriously as an abstract artist, was a rare instance of public renunciation.

For those of us seeking to distance ourselves from the status quo, we shall need such conviction such as Guston’s. 

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[i] Undated, (1970s?), quoted, Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2023 (3^rd ed., 1989), p. 234

[ii] Quoted, Ross Feld, Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston, New York Review of Books, New York, 2022 (2003), p. 16

[iii] The WPA project had ended long before Guston’s 1970 exhibition. The reference to separating oneself from the state does not refer to Guston but to the artists working today in the West.